


Toward Eternity

by bookhobbit



Category: Discworld - Terry Pratchett
Genre: Anthropomorphic Personifications, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-04
Updated: 2015-08-04
Packaged: 2018-04-12 23:13:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 830
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4498356
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bookhobbit/pseuds/bookhobbit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Death meets Life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Toward Eternity

**Author's Note:**

> based on this: sator-the-wanderess.tumblr.com/post/125761852291/youve-never-met-life-have-you-i-can-say-in

She is not at all as he expected. Perhaps Miss Flitworth's description affected him. But this - not an electric storm in trousers. No trousers at all - she wears a robe that's white like new cream. Not so much lightning as a gentle fall of rain, though there is power crackling behind her that he can sense in the deepest part of his ribcage and skull that has the feel of a storm a long way off.

He thinks perhaps she had hidden it to make him more comfortable. The thought is...amusing.

His own power is the coldness of a void, the absence of everything, hollowness. He cannot hide it. Nothingness cannot be erased, it can only be filled, and he has nothing with which to fill it.

I BROUGHT YOU A ROSE, says Death, holding it out. I AM AFRAID IT HAS NOT SURVIVED THE JOURNEY WELL.

Life reaches out to catch one of the falling petals, which instantly brightens in her fingers. _it is beautiful_ , she says. She touches the flower and it quickens, the drooping stem straightens, the withering leaves become green and fresh. Death hands it to her.

IT WILL BE SAFER WITH YOU THAN WITH ME.

 _i thank you for the gift. i have nothing for you except_ \- she thinks a moment, and then pulls a strand of her hair out. Death watches this with interest, never having had hair himself.

As it leaves her head it shifts shape into a strand of ripe golden wheat that makes him think of his own fields. He takes it uncertainly. In his hand it fades out to deeper brown, but does not blow away.

THANK YOU, he says. I WILL PLANT THE SEEDS IN MY LAND.

 _and i will plant this_ \- she holds out the rose which, he notices, is already growing small questing roots.

I NEVER MEAN TO END THE THINGS YOU CREATE, he says as he watches the wheat die in his hand.

 _it is your nature and your duty, just as it is mine._ She smiles. Behind her a delicate new sprout peeks above the earth, vivid against the grey soil of this meeting-place.

There was no life or death here before, only forever. But now it has been changed irrevocably, and the plant will grow and shrivel and, because it is the first, he will be sent for it. He premembers gathering its tiny green soul and releasing it into the air with something that would be a blessing if he knew how to make them. He premembers watching it float away into a future he cannot see.

He knows this is her way of telling him that she doesn't mind. They both have a place here.

ALL THE SAME, he muses, I SUPPOSE PEOPLE ARE GENERALLY MORE GLAD TO SEE YOU THAN ME.

She tilts her head. _they do not remember me - they only see me sometimes at the beginning and they retain none of it. i see them as - sparks. beautiful sparks. but i have been cursed, often. perhaps as often as you. i too have been called cruel, capricious, heartless._

BUT YOU ARE NOT.

_no. i am good at my job._

Death nods. SOMETHING WE HAVE IN COMMON.

_quite. i let them go, and sometimes the world is very cruel to them, but i am not and you are not. we know this. they cannot._

THEY CANNOT, he agrees, because humans are so, so bound to their little lives, cannot look out beyond into the range of billions of years - it would shatter them to know the vast insignificance of everything in the context of a universe expanding every second. Because humans are so, so creative that they invented boredom to shield themselves from the unbearable intensity of the universe they live in.

He never ceases to wonder at them. At life. At children being born daily as if it's hardly even a miracle at all - as if it's not wildly improbable that anything exists. Life, he thinks, understands this.

 _look. it is like this,_ she says. She stoops to draw in the dirt. She draws first the symbol on her pin - alpha, he realizes - and then beside it the horseshoe-shape of his omega, on its side with the open end facing the alpha's back. With a few deft strokes she turns it into a sideways figure-8 he recognizes.

 _infinity_ , she says. _the two of us, beginning and ending, an eternal cycle. without one, neither. we both must have a place or it means nothing. without beginning there is no being and without ending there is no meaning._

He nods, and she stands and clasps his hand like a friend. For a moment they stand there that way, and there _is_ no beginning and no end; they are an inseparable force, energy and matter changing places eternally, nothing created or destroyed.

Then they separate, and go about their business, because humans cannot deal in forever, not yet.

But he remembers.


End file.
